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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000015- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
16 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
17
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000018- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
19 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
20 modified the list.
21
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000022- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
23 functions is now writable.
24
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000025- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
26 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
27 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
28 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
29
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000030- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
31 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
32 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
33 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
34 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000035
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000036- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
37 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
38
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000039Extension modules
40-----------------
41
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000042- Added socket.socketpair().
43
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000044Library
45-------
46
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +000047- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
48of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer frame,
49u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
50
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000051- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
52 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
53 contains symlinks.
54
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +000055- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
56 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
57
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +000058- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
59 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
60 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
61
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000062- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
63 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
64 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
65 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
66 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
67 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
68 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
69 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
70 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
71 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
72 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
73 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
74 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
75
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000076Tools/Demos
77-----------
78
79Build
80-----
81
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000082- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
83 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
84
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000085C API
86-----
87
88Documentation
89-------------
90
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +000091- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if it contains
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +000092symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment since 1992, but is now in
93the library reference as well.
94
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000095New platforms
96-------------
97
98Tests
99-----
100
101Windows
102-------
103
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000104- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
105 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
106 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
107 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
108 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
109 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
110 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
111 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
112 the problem.
113
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000114Mac
115---
116
117
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000118What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
119=================================
120
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000121*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000122
123Core and builtins
124-----------------
125
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000126- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
127 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
128 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
129 sensitive code.
130
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000131- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
132 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
133 @staticmethod
134 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000135 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000136
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000137- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
138 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
139 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
140 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
141 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
142 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
143 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
144 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
145 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
146 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
147 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
148
149 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
150 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
151 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
152 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
153 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
154 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
155 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
156
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000157- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
158 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
159
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000160- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000161 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000162
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000163- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000164 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000165 which was missing for no apparent reason.
166
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000167- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000168 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
169 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
170
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000171- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
172 types that support garbage collection.
173
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000174- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
175
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000176- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
177 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
178 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
179 Jython.
180
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000181- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
182
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000183- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
184 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
185
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000186- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
187 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
188 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000189
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000190- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
191 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
192 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
193
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000194Extension modules
195-----------------
196
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000197- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
198
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000199Library
200-------
201
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000202- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
203 TIS-620
204
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000205- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
206 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
207 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
208 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
209 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
210 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
211 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
212 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
213 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
214 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
215
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000216- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
217
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000218- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
219 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
220 same as when the argument is omitted).
221 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
222
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000223- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
224
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000225- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
226 schemes are offered.
227
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000228- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
229
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000230- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
231 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
232 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
233
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000234- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
235
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000236- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
237 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
238
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000239- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
240 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
241 when dummy_threading is being used.
242
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000243- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
244 from a tarfile.
245
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000246- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000247 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000248
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000249- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
250 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
251 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
252 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
253
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000254- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
255 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
256
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000257- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
258 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
259 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
260 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
261 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
262 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
263 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
264 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
265 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
266 by some other method in progress).
267
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000268- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
269 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
270 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000271
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000272- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
273
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000274- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
275 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
276 AM Kuchling.
277
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000278- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
279 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
280 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
281
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000282- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
283 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
284 instead of unsigned.
285
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000286- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000287 no longer part of the public API.
288
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000289- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
290 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
291 string methods of the same name).
292
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000293- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000294 SF patch 945642.
295
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000296- doctest unittest integration improvements:
297
298 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
299
300 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
301 DocTestSuites.
302
303- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
304 that provide thread-local data.
305
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000306- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
307 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
308
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000309- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
310
311- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
312 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
313 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
314
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000315- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
316
317 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
318 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
319 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000320
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000321 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
322 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
323 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
324 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
325
326 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
327 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
328
329 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
330 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
331 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
332 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
333
334 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
335 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
336 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
337 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
338 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
339
340 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
341 wrapping help output.
342
343 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
344 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
345 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000346
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000347C API
348-----
349
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000350- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
351 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
352 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
353 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
354 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
355 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
356 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
357 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
358 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
359 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
360 its visible semantics have not changed.
361
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000362- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
363 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
364
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000365Documentation
366-------------
367
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000368- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000369
370 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000371 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000372
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000373 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000374
375 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
376
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000377- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000378
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000379Tests
380-----
381
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000382- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000383 platforms that use the Makefile.
384
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000385- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
386 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
387 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
388
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000389
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000390What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
391=================================
392
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000393*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000394
395Core and builtins
396-----------------
397
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000398- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
399 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
400 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
401 objects now (one object instead of three).
402
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000403- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
404 Windows DLLs.
405
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000406- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
407 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000408
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000409- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
410 a new .pyc magic.
411
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000412- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
413 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
414 be there.
415
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000416- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
417 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
418 the LC_NUMERIC category.
419
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000420- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
421 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
422 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
423
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000424- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
425
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000426- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
427 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
428 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000429
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000430- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
431 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
432
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000433- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
434
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000435- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000436 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000437
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000438- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
439
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000440- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
441
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000442- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
443 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
444
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000445- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
446 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
447 Fixes bug #858016 .
448
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000449- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
450 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
451 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
452
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000453- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
454 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
455 improves their performance (about 35%).
456
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000457- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
458 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
459 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
460
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000461- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
462 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
463 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
464 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
465
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000466- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
467 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
468 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
469 length is not known).
470
471- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
472 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000473 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
474 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000475 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
476
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000477- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
478 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
479
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000480- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
481 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
482 keyword arguments.
483
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000484- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
485 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
486 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
487
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000488- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
489 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
490 cases.
491
492- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
493 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
494 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
495 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
496 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
497 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
498 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
499 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
500 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
501 a release build.
502
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000503- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
504 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
505
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000506- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000507 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000508
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000509- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
510 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
511 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
512 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
513 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
514 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
515 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
516 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
517 destroyed.
518
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000519- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
520 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
521 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
522 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
523 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
524 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
525 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
526 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
527
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000528- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
529 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
530 character other than a space.
531
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000532- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
533 by the function object or by the method object, the function
534 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
535 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
536 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
537 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
538 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
539 attributes with the same name.
540
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000541- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
542 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
543 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
544 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
545 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
546 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
547 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
548 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
549 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
550 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
551 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
552 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
553 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
554 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000555
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000556- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
557 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
558 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
559 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
560 This has been repaired.
561
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000562- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
563
564- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
565
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000566- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
567 over a sequence.
568
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000569- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000570 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000571
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000572- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
573
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000574- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
575 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
576 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
577 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
578 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
579 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
580 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
581 records with equal keys is unchanged).
582
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000583- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
584 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
585 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
586
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000587- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
588 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
589 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
590 freelist.
591
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000592- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
593 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
594
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000595- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
596 number.
597
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000598- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
599 a TypeError exception.
600
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000601- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
602 820195.
603
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000604- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
605 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
606 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
607
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000608- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000609 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
610 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000611
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000612- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
613 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
614 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
615
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000616- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
617 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000618 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000619
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000620- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000621 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
622 the first call.
623
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000624
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000625Extension modules
626-----------------
627
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000628- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
629 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
630
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000631- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
632 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
633 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
634 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
635 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
636 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
637 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000638
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000639- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
640
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000641- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
642
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000643- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
644 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
645
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000646- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
647 fewer false positives.
648
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000649- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
650 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
651
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000652- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000653 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
654
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000655- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000656 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000657 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
658 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
659 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000660
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000661- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
662 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
663 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
664 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
665
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000666- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
667 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
668 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
669 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
670 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
671 #897625.
672
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000673- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
674 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
675
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000676- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
677 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
678 and pops on either side of the deque.
679
680- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
681 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
682
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000683- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
684 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
685 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
686 other functions that expect a function argument.
687
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000688- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
689
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000690- os.getsid was added.
691
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000692- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
693 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
694 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
695
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000696- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
697
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000698- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
699
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000700- readline.clear_history was added.
701
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000702- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
703
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000704- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
705
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000706- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
707
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000708- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
709
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000710- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
711
712- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
713
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000714- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
715
716- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
717
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000718- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
719 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
720 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
721
722- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
723 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
724 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
725 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
726 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
727 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
728 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
729
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000730- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
731 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
732 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
733 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000734
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000735- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000736 iterators from a single iterable.
737
738- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
739 of raising a TypeError exception.
740
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000741- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
742 as parameter.
743
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000744Library
745-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000746
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000747- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
748 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
749 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000750
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000751- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
752 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
753 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000754
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000755- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000756
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000757- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
758 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000759
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000760- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
761 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
762
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000763- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
764
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000765- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000766 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000767
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000768- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
769 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
770
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000771- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
772
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000773- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
774 on cygwin and mingw32.
775
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000776- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
777
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000778- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
779 module.
780
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000781- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
782 installation scheme for all platforms.
783
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000784- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000785 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000786
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000787- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
788 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
789 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
790
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000791- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
792 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
793 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
794
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000795- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
796
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000797- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
798
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000799- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
800 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
801
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000802- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
803 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
804 type pattern with the same value exists.
805
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000806- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
807 when run from the command prompt).
808
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000809- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
810 not taken into consideration when caching value.
811
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000812- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
813 default sort).
814
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000815- Added global runctx function to profile module
816
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000817- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
818
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000819- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
820
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000821- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
822
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000823- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000824 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
825 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
826 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
827 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
828 accordingly.
829
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000830- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
831 decoding standards.
832
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000833- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
834 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
835 called for all requests.
836
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000837- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
838 they are passed to the compiler.
839
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000840- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
841 indent, width and depth.
842
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000843- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
844 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
845
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000846- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
847 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
848
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000849- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
850
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000851- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
852
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000853- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
854
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000855- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
856 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
857
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000858- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000859 for better performance.
860
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000861- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000862
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000863- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
864 a string).
865
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000866- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
867
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000868- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
869
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000870- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
871
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000872- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
873
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000874- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
875 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
876 list of fieldnames.
877
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000878- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
879 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
880
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000881- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
882
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000883- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
884 empty lists.
885
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000886- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
887 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
888 and shelves.
889
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000890- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
891 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
892
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000893- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000894 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
895 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000896
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000897- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
898 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000899 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000900
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000901- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000902 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
903 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
904
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000905- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
906 and removed in Py2.4.
907
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000908- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
909
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000910- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
911
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000912Tools/Demos
913-----------
914
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000915- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
916 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
917
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000918- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
919
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000920- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
921 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
922 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
923 destination in situations where both files are given.
924
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000925- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
926 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
927 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
928 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
929
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000930- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
931
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000932- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
933 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
934 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
935 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
936 now.
937
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000938- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
939 in effect
940
941- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
942 C-c C-h
943
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000944- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
945 -d option was given.
946
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000947Build
948-----
949
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000950- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
951 build under OS X.
952
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000953- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
954 --enable-profiling.
955
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000956- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
957 is configured --with-tsc.
958
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000959- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
960 on AMD64.
961
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000962- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
963 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
964
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000965- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
966 removed.
967
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000968- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
969 supported (see PEP 11).
970
971- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
972
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000973- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
974
975- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
976 (see PEP 11).
977
978- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
979 sizeof(char) must be 1.
980
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000981C API
982-----
983
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000984- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
985 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
986 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
987
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000988- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
989 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
990 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
991 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
992
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000993- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
994 generator objects.
995
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000996- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
997 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000998 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
999 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001000
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001001- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1002 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1003
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001004- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1005 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1006 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1007 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1008 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1009
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001010- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1011 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1012 about 10% faster.
1013
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001014- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1015 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1016
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001017- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1018 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1019 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1020 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1021
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001022Windows
1023-------
1024
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001025- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1026 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1027 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1028 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1029
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001030- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1031 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1032 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1033
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001034
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001035What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1036===============================
1037
1038*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1039
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001040IDLE
1041----
1042
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001043- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1044 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1045 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1046 context-menu actions.
1047
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001048- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1049 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1050 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1051 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1052 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1053 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1054 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1055 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1056 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1057
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001058
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001059What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1060=============================================
1061
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001062*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001063
1064Core and builtins
1065-----------------
1066
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001067- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001068 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001069 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1070
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001071Extension modules
1072-----------------
1073
1074- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1075 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1076 than once. This has been fixed.
1077
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001078- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1079 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1080 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1081 call.
1082
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001083- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1084
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001085Library
1086-------
1087
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001088- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1089 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1090
1091- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1092 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1093 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1094 restored.
1095
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001096IDLE
1097----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001098
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001099- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001100
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001101Build
1102-----
1103
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001104- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1105 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1106
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001107C API
1108-----
1109
1110Windows
1111-------
1112
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001113- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1114 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1115
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001116- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1117
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001118Mac
1119---
1120
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001121- Various fixes to pimp.
1122
1123- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1124
1125- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1126 more problems than it solves.
1127
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001128
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001129What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1130=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001131
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001132*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1133
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001134Core and builtins
1135-----------------
1136
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001137- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1138 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1139
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001140- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1141 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001142 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001143
1144- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1145 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1146 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001147 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001148
1149- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1150 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001151
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001152- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1153 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1154 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1155
1156- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001157 770247.
1158
1159- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001160
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001161Extension modules
1162-----------------
1163
1164- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1165 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1166
1167- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1168
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001169- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1170
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001171- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1172 contained within the _strptime module.
1173
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001174- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1175 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1176
1177- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001178 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1179
1180- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1181 the find_class attribute, if present.
1182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001183- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001184
1185 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1186 (SF bug 763298).
1187
1188 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001189 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1190 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1191 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001192
1193 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1194
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001195Library
1196-------
1197
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001198- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1199
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001200- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1201 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1202 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1203 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1204 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1205 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1206 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1207 or Tester().
1208
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001209- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1210 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1211 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1212 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1213 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1214 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1215 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1216 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1217 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001218
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001219 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001220
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001221- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1222 weren't before was an oversight.
1223
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001224- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1225 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1226
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001227- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1228 when there are no lines.
1229
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001230- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1231 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1232
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001233- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1234 to child processes.
1235
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001236- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1237
1238- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1239
1240- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1241 xmlrpclib.
1242
1243- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1244 responses.
1245
1246- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1247 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1248
1249- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1250 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1251 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1252
1253- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1254 used as patterns.
1255
1256- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1257 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1258 than Tk 8.3.
1259
1260- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1261
1262- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001264Tools/Demos
1265-----------
1266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001267- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1268
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001269- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1270
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001271- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001272
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001273Build
1274-----
1275
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001276- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1277
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001278- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1279
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001280- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1281 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001282
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001283- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1284 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1285 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001286
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001287C API
1288-----
1289
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001290- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1291 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1292
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001293Windows
1294-------
1295
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001296- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1297 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1298 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1299 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1300 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1301 Python exception ::
1302
1303 thread.error: can't start new thread
1304
1305 is raised now.
1306
1307- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1308 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1309 instead of from DLL teardown.
1310
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001311Mac
1312---
1313
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001314- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001315 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001316 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1317 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1318 the executable in the bundle.
1319
1320- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001321
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001322- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1323
1324- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1325 on Panther.
1326
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001327What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1328================================
1329
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001330*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001331
1332Core and builtins
1333-----------------
1334
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001335- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1336 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1337 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1338 with the -i option.
1339
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001340- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1341 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1342
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001343- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1344 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1345
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001346- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1347 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1348 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1349 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1350 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1351 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1352 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1353 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1354 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1355 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1356 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1357 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1358 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001359
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001360- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1361 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1362 embedded in a lambda expression.
1363
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001364- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1365 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1366 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1367 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1368 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1369
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001370- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1371 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1372 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1373
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001374- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1375 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1376
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001377- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1378 It's writable again.
1379
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001380- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1381 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1382 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001383 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001384
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001385- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1386 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1387 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1388
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001389Extension modules
1390-----------------
1391
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001392- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1393 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1394
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001395- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1396 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1397 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1398 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1399
1400- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1401 collection.
1402
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001403- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1404 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1405 unique within a single program run.
1406
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001407- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1408 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1409
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001410- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1411 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1412
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001413- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1414 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001415
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001416- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1417
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001418- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1419 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1420
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001421- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1422 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1423 for many BSD-derived systems.
1424
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001425
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001426Library
1427-------
1428
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001429- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1430 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1431 primary ones:
1432
1433 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1434 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1435 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1436
1437 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1438 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1439 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1440 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1441 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1442 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1443
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001444- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1445 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1446 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1447 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1448 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1449 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1450 argument.
1451
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001452- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1453 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1454 in the archive.
1455
1456- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1457 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1458
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001459- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1460 569574).
1461
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001462- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1463 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1464 no more.
1465
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001466- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1467 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1468 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1469 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1470 code coverage.
1471
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001472- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1473 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1474 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001475 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1476 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001477
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001478- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1479 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1480 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001481 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001482
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001483- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1484
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001485- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1486 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1487 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1488 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1489
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001490- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1491 handling.
1492
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001493- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1494 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1495
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001496- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1497 in socket.py.
1498
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001499- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1500
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001501- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1502 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1503 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1504 opener with proxy support.
1505
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001506- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1507
1508- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1509
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001510Tools/Demos
1511-----------
1512
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001513- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1514
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001515- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1516
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001517- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1518 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001519
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001520- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1521 files.
1522
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001523Build
1524-----
1525
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001526- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001527 different root directory.
1528
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001529C API
1530-----
1531
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001532- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1533 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1534 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1535 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1536 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1537 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1538 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1539 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1540 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1541 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1542
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001543- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1544 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1545 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1546 from Python.
1547
1548
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001549New platforms
1550-------------
1551
1552None this time.
1553
1554Tests
1555-----
1556
1557- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1558 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1559
1560Windows
1561-------
1562
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001563- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1564
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001565- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1566 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1567 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1568 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1569 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1570 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1571 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1572 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1573 that's what it's for.
1574
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001575Mac
1576---
1577
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001578- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1579 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1580 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1581 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001582- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1583 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1584- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001585
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001586SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1587------------------------------------
1588
1589430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1590598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1591622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1592661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1593683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1594697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1595713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1596724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1597727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1598729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1599730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1600731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1601732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1602733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1603735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1604740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1605744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1606745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1607747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1608749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1609751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1610753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1611755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1612757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1613760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1614
1615
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001616What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1617================================
1618
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001619*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001620
1621Core and builtins
1622-----------------
1623
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001624- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1625 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1626
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001627- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1628 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1629 and cannot be strings).
1630
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001631- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1632 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1633 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1634 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1635
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001636- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1637 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1638 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1639 Python itself.
1640
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001641- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1642 the referenced object, if it has one.
1643
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001644- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1645 the thread started at
1646 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1647
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001648- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1649 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1650 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1651 placed on a list index.
1652
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001653- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1654 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1655 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1656 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1657
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001658- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1659 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1660 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1661 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1662 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1663 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1664 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1665
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001666- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1667 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1668 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1669 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1670 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1671
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001672- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1673 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001674
1675- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1676 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1677 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1678 #693195.)
1679
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001680- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1681 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001682
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001683- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001684 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001685 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1686 interpreter executions, would fail.
1687
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001688- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001689 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001690 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001691
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001692Extension modules
1693-----------------
1694
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001695- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1696 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1697 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1698 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1699
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001700- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1701 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1702
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001703- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1704 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1705 and Greg Chapman.)
1706
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001707- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1708 recursively.
1709
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001710- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001711 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1712 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1713 leaks.
1714
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001715- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1716
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001717- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1718 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1719 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1720 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1721 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1722 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1723 #705836.
1724
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001725- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001726 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1727
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001728- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1729 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1730 See SF bug #692416.
1731
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001732- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1733 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1734
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001735- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1736 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1737 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001738
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001739- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001740 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1741 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1742
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001743- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1744 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1745 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1746 timeouts to work properly.
1747
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001748Library
1749-------
1750
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001751- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1752 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1753 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1754 future release.
1755
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001756- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1757 for querying platform dependent features.
1758
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001759- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001760
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001761- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1762 pickle protocol versions.
1763
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001764- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1765 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1766 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1767
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001768- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1769
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001770- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1771 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1772 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1773 modules.
1774
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001775- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1776 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1777 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1778
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001779- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1780 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1781
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001782- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1783 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1784 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1785
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001786- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001787 MS Office extensions.
1788
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001789- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1790 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1791
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001792- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1793 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1794
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001795- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1796 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1797 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1798 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1799 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1800 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1801
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001802- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1803 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1804 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001805
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001806- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1807 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1808 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1809
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001810- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1811
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001812- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1813 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1814 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1815
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001816Tools/Demos
1817-----------
1818
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001819- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1820 See the module docstring for details.
1821
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822Build
1823-----
1824
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001825- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1826 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001827
1828C API
1829-----
1830
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001831- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1832
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001833- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1834 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1835 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1836
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001837- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1838 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001839
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001840 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1841 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1842 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001843
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001844- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001845 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1846
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001847- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1848 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1849 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001850
1851New platforms
1852-------------
1853
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001854None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001855
1856Tests
1857-----
1858
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001859- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1860 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001861
1862Windows
1863-------
1864
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001865- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1866 function.
1867
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001868- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1869 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001870
1871Mac
1872---
1873
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001874- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1875 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001876
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001877- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1878 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001879
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001880- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1881 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1882 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001883
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001884- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001885 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1886 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001887
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001888- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1889 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001890
1891
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001892What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1893=================================
1894
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001895*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001896
1897Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001898-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001899
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001900- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1901 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1902 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1903
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001904- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1905 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1906 (SF patch #664376.)
1907
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001908- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1909 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1910 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1911 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1912 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1913 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001914 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001915
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001916- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1917 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1918 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1919 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001920 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001921
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001922- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1923 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1924 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1925 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1926 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1927 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1928 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1929 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1930 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1931 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1932 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1933
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001934- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1935 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1936 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1937 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1938 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1939 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1940
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001941- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1942 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1943
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001944- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1945 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1946 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1947 case.)
1948
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001949- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1950 passed as unicode strings.
1951
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001952- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1953 See SF bug #683467.
1954
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001955- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1956 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1957
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001958- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1959
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001960- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1961
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001962- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1963 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1964 arguments.
1965
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001966- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1967 See SF bug #667147.
1968
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001969- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001970 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001971 See SF bug #676155.
1972
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001973- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001974 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001975 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1976 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1977 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1978 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1979 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1980 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001981
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001982Extension modules
1983-----------------
1984
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001985- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1986 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1987 tp_as_number pointer.
1988
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001989- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1990 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1991 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1992 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1993 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1994
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001995- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1996
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001997- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1998
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001999- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002000 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002001 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2002 patch #678531.)
2003
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002004- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2005 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2006
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002007- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2008 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2009
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002010- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2011
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002012- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2013 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2014 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2015
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002016- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2017
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002018- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2019 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2020
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002021- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002022
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002023- datetime changes:
2024
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002025 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2026
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002027 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2028 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2029 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2030 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2031 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2032 now.
2033
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002034 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002035 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2036 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002037
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002038 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002039 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002040 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2041 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2042 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2043 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002044
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002045 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2046 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2047 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002048 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2049
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002050 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2051 by a later example coded by Guido.
2052
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002053 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002054 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2055 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2056 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002057 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2058 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2059
2060 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2061 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2062 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2063 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2064 tzinfo subclass instance.
2065
2066 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2067 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2068 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2069 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2070 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2071 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2072 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2073 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002074
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002075 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2076 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2077 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2078 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2079 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002080 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2081
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002082 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002083
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002084 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2085 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2086 as a naive datetime object.
2087
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002088 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2089 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2090 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2091
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002092 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2093 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2094 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2095 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2096 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2097 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2098 comparison.
2099
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002100 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2101 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2102 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2103 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002104 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002105
2106 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002107
2108 and ::
2109
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002110 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2111
2112 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2113 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2114 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2115 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2116
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002117 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2118 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2119 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2120 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2121 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2122
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002123 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2124 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002125 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2126 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002128Library
2129-------
2130
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002131- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2132 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2133
2134- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2135 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2136 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2137 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2138 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2139 See PEP 307 for details.
2140
2141- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2142 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2143
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002144- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2145 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002146 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002147 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2148 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002149 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002150
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002151- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2152 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2153
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002154- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2155 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2156 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2157
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002158- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2159
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002160- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2161 exception.
2162
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002163- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2164 class.
2165
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002166- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2167 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2168 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2169
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002170- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2171 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2172
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002173- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002174 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2175 See SF bug #659228.
2176
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002177- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2178 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2179 See SF patch #651082.
2180
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002181- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002182
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002183- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2184 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2185
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002186- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002187 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002188
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002189- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2190 DOS paths from other platforms.
2191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002192Tools/Demos
2193-----------
2194
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002195- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2196 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2197 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2198 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2199 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2200 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2201 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2202 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2203 example:
2204
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002205 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2206 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002207
2208 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2209
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002210
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002211Build
2212-----
2213
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002214- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2215 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2216 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002217 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2218
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002219 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2220
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002221- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2222 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2223 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2224 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2225 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2226 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2227 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2228 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2229 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2230
2231- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2232 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2233 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2234 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2235
2236- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2237 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2238
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002239C API
2240-----
2241
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002242- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2243 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002244
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002245- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2246 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2247 tp_as_number pointer.
2248
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002249- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2250 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2251 (SF #681367)
2252
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002253- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2254 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2255 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2256 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002257
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002258Tests
2259-----
2260
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002261- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002262 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2263 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2264 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2265 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2266 pydoc.)
2267
2268- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2269
2270- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002271
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002272Windows
2273-------
2274
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002275- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2276 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2277 time).
2278
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002279- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2280 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2281
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002282- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2283 release without strong cryptography.
2284
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002285- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002286 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002287
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002288- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2289 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002291Mac
2292---
2293
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002294- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2295 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002296
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002297- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2298 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2299 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002300
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002301- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2302 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002303
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002304- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2305 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2306 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2307 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002308
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002309- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002310 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2311 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2312 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002313
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002315What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002316=================================
2317
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002318*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002319
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002320Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002321--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002322
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002323- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2324
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002325- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2326 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002327 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002328 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002329 a different meaning than before.
2330
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002331- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002332 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002333 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002334
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002335- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002336 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002337 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002338
2339- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2340 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2341 and deallocation.
2342
2343- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2344 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2345
2346- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2347 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2348 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2349 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2350 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2351
2352- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2353 now detected by the garbage collector.
2354
2355- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2356 [SF bug 519621]
2357
2358- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2359 identifier.
2360
2361- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2362 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2363 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2364 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2365 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2366 [SF bug 563060]
2367
2368- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2369 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2370 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2371 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2372 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2373
2374- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2375 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2376 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2377
2378- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2379
2380- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2381 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2382 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2383 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2384 state of the slots would be lost.)
2385
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002388
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002389- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002390 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2391 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2392 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2393 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002394 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2395 Jython 2.1.
2396
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002397- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002398 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002399 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2400 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2401 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2402 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2403 these, see PEP 302.
2404
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002405- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2406 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2407 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2408
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002409- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2410 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2411 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2412
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002413- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2414 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2415 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2416
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002417- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2418 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2419 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2420 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2421 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2422 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2423 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2424 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2425 releases or implementations.
2426
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002427- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002428 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2429 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002430
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002431- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2432 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2433
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002434- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2435 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2436 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2437
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002438- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2439 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2440
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002441- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2442 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002443 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2444 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002445
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002446- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2447 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2448 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2449 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2450 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2451
2452 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2453 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2454 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2455 pattern.
2456
2457 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2458 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2459 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2460 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2461
2462 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2463 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2464 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2465 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2466 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2467 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2468
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002469- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2470 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2471 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2472 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2473 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2474 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2475 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2476 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002477
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002478- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2479 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2480 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2481 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2482 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002483 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2484 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2485 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2486 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2487 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2488 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2489 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002490
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002491- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2492 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2493
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002494- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2495 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2496 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2497 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2498 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2499 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2500 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2501 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2502 to Zack Weinberg!
2503
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002504- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2505 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2506 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2507 type. This has been fixed now.
2508
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002509- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2510 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2511 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2512
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002513- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2514 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2515 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2516 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2517 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2518 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2519 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2520 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002521 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002522
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002523- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2524 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2525 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002526
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002527- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2528 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2529 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2530 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2531 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2532 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2533 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2534 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002535 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002536 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2537 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2538
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002539- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2540 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2541 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2542 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2543 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2544 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2545 this.)
2546
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002547- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2548 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002549 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002550 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002551 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2552 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002553 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2554 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002555
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002556- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2557 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2558 currently running.
2559
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002560- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2561 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2562 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2563 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2564
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002565- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2566 as directory names.
2567
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002568- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2569 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2570
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002571- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2572 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2573
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002574- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002575 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2576 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002577
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002578- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2579 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2580 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2581 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2582 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2583
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002584- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2585 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2586 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2587 removed.
2588
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002589- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2590 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2591 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2592
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002593- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2594 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2595 to __debug__.
2596
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002597- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2598 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2599 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2600
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002601- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2602 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2603 deprecated now.
2604
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002605- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2606 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2607 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002608
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002609- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2610 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2611 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2612 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2613 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002614
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002615- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2616 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2617
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002618- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2619 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2620 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002621 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002622 is backward compatible.
2623
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002624- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2625 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2626 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2627 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2628 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2629
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002630- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2631 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2632 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2633 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2634 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2635 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002636
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002637- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2638 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2639
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002640- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2641 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2642
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002643- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2644 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2645 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2646 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2647 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2648
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002649- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2650 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2651 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2652
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002653- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002654 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2655
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002656- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2657 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2658 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002659
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002660- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2661 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2662
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002663- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2664 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2665 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2666
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002667- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002669Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002670-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002671
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002672- Added three operators to the operator module:
2673 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2674 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2675 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2676
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002677- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2678
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002679- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2680 archives.
2681
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002682- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2683 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2684 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2685
2686 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2687
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002688- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2689 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2690 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002691 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002692
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002693- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2694 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2695 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2696 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002697 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2698 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2699 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2700 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002701
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002702- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2703 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002704
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002705- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2706
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002707- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2708 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2709
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002710- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2711 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2712 supported.
2713
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002714- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2715
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002716- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2717 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002718
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002719- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2720 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2721
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002722- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2723
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002724- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2725 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2726
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002727- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2728 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2729 functions but callable type objects.
2730
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002731- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002732 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002733 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002734
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002735- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2736 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002737
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002738- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2739 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002740
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002741- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2742 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2743 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2744 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2745
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002746- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2747 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002748
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002749- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2750 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2751 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2752 and __imul__.
2753
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002754- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002755 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2756 is called.
2757
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002758- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2759 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2760 interpreter was compiled.
2761
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002762- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2763 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2764 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002765 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002766 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2767 1, not 2.
2768
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002769- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2770 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2771 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2772 limit.
2773
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002774- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2775 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2776 bug #623464.
2777
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002778- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2779 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2780 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2781 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2782
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002783Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002784-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002785
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002786- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2787
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002788- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2789 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2790 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2791 with Python 2.3a2.
2792
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002793- os.path exposes getctime.
2794
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002795- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002796 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002797 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002798 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002799 unit tests of floating point results.
2800
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002801- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2802 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2803 has been increased.
2804
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002805- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2806 executed.
2807
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002808- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2809 postinstallation script.
2810
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002811- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2812 test the current module.
2813
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002814- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002815 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2816 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2817 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2818 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2819
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002820- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002821 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002822 Ward's Optik package.
2823
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002824- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2825 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2826 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2827 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2828
2829- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2830 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002831 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002832
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002833- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2834 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2835 shelf are binary pickles.
2836
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002837- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2838 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2839
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002840- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2841 modules are iterators now.
2842
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002843- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2844 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2845 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2846 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2847 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2848 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002849
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002850- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2851 with their entity value.
2852
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002853- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2854
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002855- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2856 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002857
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002858- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2859 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002860 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002861
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002862- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2863 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2864 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2865 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2866 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2867 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2868 main():
2869
2870 import locale
2871 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2872
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002873- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2874 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2875
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002876- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2877 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2878 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2879 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2880 to the new standard.
2881
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002882- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2883 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2884 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2885 an extension to the database.
2886
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002887- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2888 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2889 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2890 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002891 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002892
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002893- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002894 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002895
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002896- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2897 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2898 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2899 bounded integers.
2900
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002901- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2902 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2903 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2904 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2905 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2906 in existence.
2907
2908 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2909 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2910 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2911 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2912 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2913 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2914
2915 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2916 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2917 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2918 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2919
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002920- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2921 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2922 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2923
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002924- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2925
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002926- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2927 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2928 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2929 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2930
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002931- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2932 argument.
2933
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002934- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2935 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2936 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2937 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2938 [SF patch 560794].
2939
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002940- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2941 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2942 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002943 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2944 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2945 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002946
2947- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2948 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002949
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002950- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2951 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2952 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2953 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002954
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002955- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2956 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2957 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2958 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2959 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2960
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002961- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002962
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002963- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2964
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002965- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2966 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2967 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2968 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2969 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2970 identical to None.
2971
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002972- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2973 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2974 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2975 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2976 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2977 results now.
2978
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002979- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2980 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2981
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002982- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2983 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2984 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2985 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2986 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2987 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2988 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2989 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2990
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002991- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2992
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002993- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2994 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2995
2996- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2997 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2998 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2999 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3000 and other systems.
3001
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003002- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3003 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3004 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3005 UTF-16 is a 2-byte encoding and the C lib's line reading APIs don't
Marc-André Lemburg4179a012002-04-05 12:15:05 +00003006 work well with these.
3007
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003008- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3009
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003010- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003011 connections.
3012
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003013- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3014 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3015 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3016
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003017- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3018 sets
3019
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003020- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3021 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3022 name.
3023
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003024- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3025 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3026 passed in.
3027
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003028- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003029 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003030 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3031 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003032
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003033- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3034
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003035- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3036
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003037- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3038 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3039 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3040
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003041- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3042 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3043 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3044 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003045 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003046
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003047- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003048 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003049 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003050
3051- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3052 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3053 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3054
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003055- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003056 the value of its expression argument.
3057
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003058- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3059 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3060 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3061
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003062- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3063 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3064 skipstone browser was included.
3065
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003066- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3067 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3068
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003069Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003070-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003071
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003072- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3073 names in addition to accepting file names.
3074
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003075- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3076 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3077 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3078 still used and useful.)
3079
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003080- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3081 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3082 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3083 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003084
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003085- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3086 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3087 the generated binary.
3088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003089Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003091
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003092- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3093
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003094- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3095 except in the hands of experts.
3096
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003097- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003098 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3099 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3100 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003101
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003102- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3103 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3104 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3105 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3106 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3107 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3108 builds.
3109
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003110- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3111 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3112 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3113 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3114 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3115 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3116 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3117 new type.
3118
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003119- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003120
3121 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3122 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3123 positive infinities.
3124
3125 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3126 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3127 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3128 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3129 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3130 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3131 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3132
3133 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3134
3135 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3136
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003137- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3138 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3139 size of the executable.
3140
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003141- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3142 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3143 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3144 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003145
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003146- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3147
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003148- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3149 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3150 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003151
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003152- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3153 well as Unix.
3154
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003155- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3156 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3157 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3158 modules in the README file for details.
3159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003160C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003162
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003163- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3164 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003165 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003166 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003167 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003168
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003169- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3170 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3171 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3172 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3173 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3174 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003175 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003176 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3177 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3178 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3179 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3180 aligned.)
3181
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003182- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3183 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3184 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3185
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003186- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3187 level.
3188
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003189- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3190 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3191 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3192 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3193 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3194
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003195- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3196 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3197 code.
3198
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003199- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3200 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3201 adjusting for negative indices.
3202
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003203- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3204 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3205 object.
3206
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003207- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3208 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3209 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3210
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003211- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3212 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003213
3214- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3215
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003216- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3217 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3218 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3219 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3220
3221- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3222
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003223- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003224
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003225- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003226 without going through the buffer API.
3227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003229
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003230- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3231 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3232 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3233 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3234
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003235- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3236 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3237
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003238- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003239 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3240
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003241New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003242-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003243
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003244- OpenVMS is now supported.
3245
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003246- AtheOS is now supported.
3247
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003248- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3249
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003250- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3251
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003252Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003253-----
3254
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003255- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3256 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3257 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003258
3259Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003261
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003262- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3263 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3264 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3265 bugs.
3266 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003267 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003268 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3269 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003270 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003271
3272- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003273 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003274
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003275- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3276 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3277
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003278- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3279 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003280 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003281 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3282
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003283- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3284 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3285 use files" uninstall option).
3286
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003287- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3288
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003289- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3290 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3291
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003292- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3293 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3294 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3295
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003296- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3297 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3298 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3299 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3300 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003301 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3302 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3303 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003304
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003305- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003306 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003307 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3308 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3309 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3310 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3311 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3312 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3313 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3314 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3315 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3316 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3317 work around.
3318
3319- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3320 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3321 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3322 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3323 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3324 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3325 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3326 specified with O_CREAT too).
3327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003328Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329----
3330
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003331- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003333- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3334 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3335 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3336
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003337- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3338 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3339 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3340
3341- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3342 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3343 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3344 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3345 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3346 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3347 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3348 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003349
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003350- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3351 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3352 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003354- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3355 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3356 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3357 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3358 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003359
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003360- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3361 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3362 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003363
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003364- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3365 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003366
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003367- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3368 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3369 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3370 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3371 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003372
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003373- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3374 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3375 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3376
3377- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3378 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3379 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003380
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003381- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3382 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3383 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3384 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003385 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003386
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003387- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3388 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003389
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003390- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3391 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003392
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003393- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003394 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003395 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3396 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003397
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003398
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003399What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003400===============================
3401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3403
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003404Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003406
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003407- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3408 with a custom metaclass.
3409
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003410Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003412
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003413- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3414 are proxies.
3415
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003416Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003418
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003419- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3420 very short strings.
3421
3422- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3423 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3424 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3425 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3426 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3427
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003428Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003430
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003431- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3432 close or delete time).
3433
3434- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3435 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3436
3437- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3438
3439- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003440 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003441
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003442Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003444
3445Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003446-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003447
3448C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450
3451New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003453
3454Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003455-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003456
3457Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003459
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003460- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3461
3462- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3463 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3464
3465- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3466 deleted at process exit time.
3467
3468- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3469 in backslash.
3470
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003471Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003473
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003474- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3475 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3476 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3477
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003478
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003479What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003480===========================
3481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3483
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003484Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003486
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003487- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3488 been extensively updated. See
3489
3490 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3491
3492 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3493
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003494- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3495 deleted!
3496
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003497- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3498 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3499 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3500 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3501 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3502
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003503- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3504
3505 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3506 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3507
3508 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3509 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3510 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3511 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3512 supported anyway.
3513
3514 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3515 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3516
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003517- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3518 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3519 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3520 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3521 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003522
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003523- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3524 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3525 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3526
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003527Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003529
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003530- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3531 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3532 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3533 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3534 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3535 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003536 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3537 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3538 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3539 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003540
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003541- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3542 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3543 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3544
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003545Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003547
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003548- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3549
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003550Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003552
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003553- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3554 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3555 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3556 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3557 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3558 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3559
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003560- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3561
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003562- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3563
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003564- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3565
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003566- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3567 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3568 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3569
3570- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3571
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003572Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003574
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003575- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3576 off a search on Google.
3577
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003578Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003580
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003581- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3582 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3583 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3584 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3585 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3586 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3587 other platforms should do likewise.
3588
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003589- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3590 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3591 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3592
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003595
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003596- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3597 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3598 producing key-value pairs.
3599
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003600- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003601 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003602 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3603 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3604 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3605 previously went unchallenged.
3606
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003607New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003609
3610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003612
3613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003615
3616Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003618
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003619- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3620 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003621
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003622- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3623 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3624 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3625 home.
3626
3627
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003628What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003629===========================
3630
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3632
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003633Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003634--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003635
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003636- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3637 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003638
3639 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003640 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003641
3642 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3643 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003644 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003645 This needs to be documented.
3646
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003647- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3648 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3649
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003650- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3651 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3652 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3653
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003654- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3655 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3656
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003657- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3658 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3659 class forbids it).
3660
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003661- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3662 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3663 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3664
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003665- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3666
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003667Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003669
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003670- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3671 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003672 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003673
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003674- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3675 (like 1 + '').
3676
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003677Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003679
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003680- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3681 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3682 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3683 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003684 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003685 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3686
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003687- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3688 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3689 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3690 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3691
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003692- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3693 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003694 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3695 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3696 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003697
3698- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3699 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003700
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003701- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3702 bytes on its input.
3703
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003704Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003706
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003707- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003708 convenience function.
3709
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003710- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3711 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3712 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003713 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3714 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3715 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3716 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3717 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3718 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003719
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003720- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3721 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3722 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3723 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3724
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003725- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3726 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3727 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3728
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003729- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3730 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3731 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3732 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3733
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003734- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3735 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003737 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3738 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3739 new -l and -e options.
3740
3741- statcache is now deprecated.
3742
3743- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3744 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003745 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003746 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3747 time properly taken into account.
3748
3749- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3750 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3751 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3752 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003754Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003756
3757Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003758-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003759
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003760- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3761 is built with libdb3 if available.
3762
3763- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3764
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003765C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003767
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003768- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3769 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3770 PySequence_Size().
3771
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003772- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3773
3774- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3775 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3776 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3777
3778- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3779 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3780
3781- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3782 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3783
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003784New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003786
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003787- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3788 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3789
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003790- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3791 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3792
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003793- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3794
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003795Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003797
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003798- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3799 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3800
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003801Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003803
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003804Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003806
3807- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3808 removed completely in the next release.
3809
3810- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3811 OSX.
3812
3813- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3814 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3815
3816- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3817
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003818
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003819What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003820===========================
3821
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3823
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003824Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003826
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003827- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003828 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003829 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003830 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3831 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003832 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3833 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003834 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3835 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003836
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003837- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3838 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3839
3840- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3841 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3842
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003843Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003845
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003846- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3847 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3848 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3849 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3850 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3851 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3852 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3853 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3854
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003855- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3856 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3857 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3858 example).
3859
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003860- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003861 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003862 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003863 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003864
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003865- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3866 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3867 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003868 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003869
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003870- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3871 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3872 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3873 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3874 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3875 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3876
3877 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3878
3879 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3880
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003881Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003883
3884- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3885
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003886- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3887
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003888- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3889 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003890
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003891- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3892 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3893 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3894 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3895 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3896 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003897 attributes.
3898
3899- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3900 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3901 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003902
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003903- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3904 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3905 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003906
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003907- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3908 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3909 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003910 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3911 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3912
3913- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3914 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003915
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003916Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003918
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003919- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3920 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3921
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003922- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3923 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3924 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3925 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3926
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003927- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3928 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3929 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3930 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3931
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003932 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3933 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3934 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3935 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3936 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3937 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3938 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3939 without losing information).
3940
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003941- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003942 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3943 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3944 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3945 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3946 module).
3947
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003948 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003949 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3950 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3951 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3952 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003953
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003954- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003955 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3956 encoding.
3957
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003958- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3959 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3960
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003962 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3963
3964- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3965 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3966 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3967 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3968
3969- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3970
3971- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3972 ON, and OFF.
3973
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003974- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3975 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3976
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003977Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003979
3980- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3981 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3982 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003983
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003984- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3985 been added: -X and -E.
3986
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003987Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003989
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003990- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3991 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3992
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003993C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003995
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003996- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3997 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3998 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3999 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4000 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4001
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004002- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4003 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4004 as long) arguments.
4005
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004006- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4007 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4008 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4009 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4010 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4011 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4012
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004013- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4014 input.
4015
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004016New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004018
4019Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004021
4022Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004024
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004025- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4026 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4027 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4028
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004029- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4030 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4031 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004032 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4035 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4036 import signal
4037 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004038
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004040 while 1:
4041 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004043 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4044 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4045 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4046 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004047
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004048
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004049What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4050===========================
4051
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4053
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004054Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004055--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004056
4057- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4058 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4059 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4060
4061- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4062 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4063 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4064 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4065 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4066 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4067 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004068
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004069- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004070 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004071 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4072 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4073 associate a docstring with a property.
4074
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004075- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4076 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4077 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4078 other built-in object types.
4079
4080- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4081 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4082 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4083 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4084 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4085
4086- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4087 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4088
4089- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4090 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004091 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004092 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4093 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4094 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4095 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4096 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4097
4098- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4099 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4100 class.
4101
4102- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4103 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4104 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4105 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4106
4107- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4108 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4109 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4110 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4111
4112- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4113 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4114
4115- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4116 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4117 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4118 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4119 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004120 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004121 with the same value as s.
4122
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004123- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4124
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004125Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004127
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004128- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4129
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004130- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4131 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4132 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4133 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4134 objects.
4135
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004136- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4137 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004138 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4139 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4140
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004141- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4142 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4143 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4144
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004145Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004147
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004148- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4149 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4150 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4151 by the instances.
4152
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004153- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4154 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4155 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4156
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004157- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4158 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4159 before the entire comparison is complete.
4160
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004161- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4162 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4163 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4164
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004165- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4166 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4167 getwriter().
4168
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004169- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4170 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4171
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004172- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004173 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4174 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4175
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004176- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4177 iterable object.
4178
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004179- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4180 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004181
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004182- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4183 authentication.
4184
4185- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4186 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004187
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004188- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004189 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4190 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4191 a sample driver.)
4192
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004193Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004195
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004196- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4197 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4198 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4199 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4200 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4201 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4202 kernel has large file support.
4203
4204- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4205 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4206 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4207 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4208 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4209
4210- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4211 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4212 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4213
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004214C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004216
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004217- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4218 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4219
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004220New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004223- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4224 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4225
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004226Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004227-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004228
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004229- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4230 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4231 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4232 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4233 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4234
4235- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4236 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4237 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4238 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4239
4240- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4241 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4242
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004243Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004245
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004246- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004247 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4248 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004249
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004250
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004251What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4252===========================
4253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4255
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004256Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004258
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004259- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4260 big to represent as a C double.
4261
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004262- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4263 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4264 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4265 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4266 restriction).
4267
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004268- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4269 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4270 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4271 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4272 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4273
4274 >>> dir([])
4275 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4276 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4277 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4278 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4279 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4280 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4281 'reverse', 'sort']
4282
4283 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4284
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004285- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004286 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4287 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4288 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4289 OverflowError exception.
4290
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004291- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004292 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004293 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4294 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4295 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4296 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4297 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004298 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4300 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4301
4302 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4303 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4304 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4305 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004306
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004307- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004308 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4309 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4310 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4311 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4312 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4313 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4314 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4315 once it is created.
4316
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004317- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4318 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4319 (key, value) pairs.
4320
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004321- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004322 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4323 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4324
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004325- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4326 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4327 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4328 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4329 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004330
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004331- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004332 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4333 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4334
4335 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4336
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004337- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004338 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4339
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004340Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004341-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004342
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004343- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004344 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4345 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004346
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004347- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4348 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4349 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4350 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4351 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4352 in this area anymore).
4353
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004354- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4355 threading.Timer.
4356
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004357- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4358 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4359
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004360- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004361 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4362
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004363- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004364 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4365 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4366 converted to Python longs.
4367
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004368- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004369 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4370
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004371- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4372 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4373 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4374
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004375Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004376-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004377
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004378- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4379 division operators as per PEP 238.
4380
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004381Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004383
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004384- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4385 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4386 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4387 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4388
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004389C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004390-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004391
4392- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004393
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004394- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4395 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004396 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4399 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004400 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004402
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004403- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004404 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4405 module:
4406
4407 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004408
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004409 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4410 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004411
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004412 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4413 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004414
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004415 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4416
4417 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4418
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004419- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004420 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4421 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4422 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004423
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004424New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004426
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004427- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4428 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4429 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4430 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4431 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004432
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004433Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004435
4436Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004438
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004439- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4440 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4441 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4442 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004443 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4444 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4445 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4446 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4447 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004448
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004449- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004450 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4451
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004452
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004453What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4454===========================
4455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4457
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004458Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004460
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004461- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4462 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4463
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004464- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4465 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4466 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004467
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004468- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4469 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4470 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4471 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004472
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004473- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004476
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004477Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004479
4480- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004481 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004482 the module docstring for details.
4483
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004484Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004486
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004487- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004488 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4489 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4490 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004491
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004492- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4493 Nick Mathewson.
4494
4495Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004497
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004498- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4499 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4500 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4501 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4502 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4503 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4504 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4505 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4506
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004507- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4508 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4509 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4510 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4511
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004512- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4513 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4514 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4515 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4516 come a long way).
4517
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004518- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4519 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4520 write filters for these warnings).
4521
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004522- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4523 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4524 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4525 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4526 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4527
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004528- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4529 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4530 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4531 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4532 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4533 older distribution.
4534
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004535Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004537
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004538- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4539 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004540 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004541
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004542- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4543 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4544 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4545
4546- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4547
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004548- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4549
4550- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4551
4552- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4553
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004555
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004556- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4557
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004558New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004560
4561C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004563
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004564- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4565 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4566 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4567 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4568 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4569 against buffer overruns.
4570
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004571- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004572 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4573 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004574 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4575 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4576 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4577
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004578- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4579 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4580 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4581 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4582 deprecated.
4583
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004584Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004586
4587- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4588 relevant is found.
4589
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004590
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004591What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004592===========================
4593
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004594*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4595
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004596Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004597----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004598
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004599- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4600 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4601 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4602 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4603 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4604 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4605 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4606 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004607 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004608 repaired.
4609
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004610- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004611 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004612 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4613 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4614 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4615 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4616 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4617 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4618 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4619 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4620
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004621- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4622 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4623 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4624 leading BMO character).
4625
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004626- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4627 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4628 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4629
4630 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4631 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4632 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004633
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004634 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4635 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4636 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4637 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4638 for various simple to use conversions.
4639
4640 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4641 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4644 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4645 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4646 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4647 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4648 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4649 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4650 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4651 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4652 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4653 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4654 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4655 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4656 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4657 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004658
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004659- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4660 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4661 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004662 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004663 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004664
4665 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004666 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4667 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4668 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4669 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4670 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004671 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4672 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004673
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004674 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4675 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4676 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004677 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004678
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004679- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4680 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4681 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4682 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4683 floating arithmetic,
4684
4685 x = 9007199254740992.0
4686 print long(x)
4687
4688 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4689 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4690 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4691 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4692 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4693 functions are of good quality).
4694
4695 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4696 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4697 algorithms to break.
4698
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004699- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4700 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4701 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4702 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4703 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4704 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4705 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4706 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4707 order.
4708
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004709- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4710 operation along the most common code paths.
4711
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004712- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4713 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4714
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004715- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4716 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4717 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4718 {}.update(UserDict())
4719
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004720- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4721 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4722 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4723 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4724 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4725 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4726 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4727 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4728
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004729- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004730 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004731
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004732 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004733 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4734 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004735 join() method of strings
4736 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004737 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4738 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004740 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004741
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004742- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4743 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4744
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004745- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4746 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4747
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004748- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4749 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4750 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4751 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4752
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004753- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4754 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004755 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004756 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4757 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004758
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004759- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4760
4761
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004762Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004764
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004765- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004766 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004767 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4768 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4769
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004770- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4771 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4772
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004773- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4774 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4775 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4776 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4777
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004778- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4779 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4780 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4781
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004782- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4783
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004784- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4785
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004786- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4787 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4788 that are still imported into string.py).
4789
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004790- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4791
4792- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4793 Now it does.
4794
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004795- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4796
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004797- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4798 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4799 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4800 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4801 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004802 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4803 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004804
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004805- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4806 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4807 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4808 'help(object)'.
4809
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004812
4813- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004814 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004815 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4816 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4817
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004818- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004819 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4820 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004821
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004822C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004824
4825- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4826 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004827
4828----
4829
4830**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**